"That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes."
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Poetry quotes
Poetry
987 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Poetry quotes (page 5 of 50)
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"Poetry is music written for the human voice."
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"If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry."
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"He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life."
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"The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar."
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"A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."
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"Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."
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"The poet is the priest of the invisible."
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"What can be explained is not poetry."
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"Test of the poet is knowledge of love, For Eros is older than Saturn or Jove; Never was poet, of late or of yore, Who was not tremulous with love-lore."
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"A poem begins with a lump in the throat"
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"Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it."
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"All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original."
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"Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away."
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"When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again."
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"All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer."
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"Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme-- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled?"
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"A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams."
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"We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line."
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"The tragic element in poetry is like Saturn in alchemy, the Malevolent, the Destroyer of Nature ; but without it no true Aurum Potabile, or Elixir of Life, can be made."
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